04 Apr 14 10:52 pm
About rich snippets - the only part i didn't get is "why is it the hardest part"? cos i thought you can just do Google for the same articles and take the subheadings from there?
Well yeah. Assuming that the articles you're finding to use as research are actually meaningful. If they're just fluff like yours... it's not going to help. It also assumes that the writer can tell from your headline what the topic actually is. "How to get a woman to want you obsessively" isn't really about how to attract women who are mentally unstable. It's about how to attract women in general, I assume. So your writer actually needs to think about that for a bit as well.
Here's the thing you need to realise... Imagine I'm a writer. I charge a minimum of $40 an hour for my time. You're paying me $20 an article.
This means I have 30 minutes to research the topic, understand the topic, read any related articles, and then write a 500 - 800 word article based on that research. 30 minutes to do everything, otherwise I start losing money.
So I'm going to assume that it takes me 20 minutes to write the article itself. This gives me about 10 minutes to do research and gather enough knowledge to put pen to paper.
There is NO WAY that I would be able to write a good, meaningful article on a topic that I originally did not have much knowledge in, with only ten minutes research.
NO WAY. I might be able to do it if I'm already an expert on the topic, but if I'm just a general kind of writer... what you're going to get is a bunch of fluff, full of wild generalisations and shallow observations. Which is basically what you've got.
So you can either pay MORE per article and allow the writer more time to do the research they need to make it actually informative, OR you can just tell them what they should be writing about in a rich snippet.
YOU take 30 minutes or so to come up with a good article outline. YOU figure out what the main points are that you want covered. Then you give it to the writer to flesh out.
Then the writer knows immediately what the article is really about, how deep you want to go, and I don't need to be wondering, "is this what he wants?". I can use my ten minutes to plan and do any additional research I need, and then I can just bang it out.
Eg, you might tell me that your article on "how to get a woman to want you obsessively" needed to touch on these points:
1) You need to be confident. It doesn't matter what you look like, so long as you have confidence.
2) Be interested in her. Don't just talk about yourself.
3) Display positive body language.
4) Let her know you like her, but don't come on too strong. Just plant the seed so that she'll start considering it.
--- I don't know if these are right, but if you gave me an outline like this: BAM, I'd be able to take it and run with it.
Without any guidance like this: I'm just going to waffle on for the desired word count because I don't have TIME to actually think about it properly.
Basically: If you want good articles you have three choices:
1) Hire someone who is already an expert in the topic
2) Hire someone who is not an expert and pay them more to give them time to do appropriate research
3) Hire someone who is not an expert and give them an outline of what you want them to write about (an article snippet)
Or you could also...
4) Hire an expert to do the research and create the snippets for you, then hire cheaper writers (not experts) to write articles based around that research. You can get multiple articles from one snippet, and it's cheaper than getting an expert to write ALL your articles.
(This is what we're going to be providing in AffiloJetpack when it re-releases soon: 20 snippets per topic, so you can give it to cheaper writers and still get good articles.)
